Blue Origin reviews

3.2

47% would recommend to a friend

(1,199 total reviews)

Dave Limp

34% approve of CEO

41% positive business outlook

Blue Origin has an employee rating of 3.2 out of 5 stars, based on 1,199 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Blue Origin employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Aerospace & Defense industry (3.6 stars).

Reviews by job title

1K reviews
1.0
Apr 3, 2020

So many problems

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Aside from some of the issues I'll bring up, many of the employees are great

Cons

Management management management. Bob Smith seems to be ignoring our current worldly crisis and is making decisions not in the best interest of the company. Very few engineers remain on site. Most are "working from home". Nobody is on the same page and there's very little communication through the pipeline. Much of what we do get is incorrect. People walk around with egos so big they can't see anything else.

5.0
Aug 17, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

To start, a friend tipped me off to Glassdoor as I'd never heard of it. I've worked at Blue for five years and just laugh at some of these recent reviews. I really have to wonder if some of these reviews are even credible or from the many talented and amazing people I know at Blue. Some of the comments below are just flat false. I also love the comments about "let's not be Big Aero". Last time I checked Big Aero does a lot of things very well...for example they build things that fly All. The. Time. They know how to manufacture with the highest quality and have supply chain capabilities at rock. Or maybe let's look at the airlines...like delta. They are somehow able to keep thousands of planes in the sky everyday. They are reliable, available, and low cost. How about let's keep Blue as nimble as possible? We have only one shareholder, a couple thousand people, no board of directors, very few regulations, etc. I've worked for the large aero companies and Blue is not that and highly likely never will be. But Blue also has to get better at some things and more mature aerospace companies are worth looking to, so we don't have to make the same mistakes they have. Let's just use a little math here. Blue currently has around 2400+ employees. I will extrapolate that there have also been 600 that have worked at Blue over its time and moved on, so out of the 3000 people familiar with Blue and with about 90 reviews posted on GD (and less than half of them being unfavorable), that's about 1% of people that have posted something negative. Off my soapbox now and on to the positives: 1) We have a super inspirational founder and all the financial funding and resources we need to achieve our mission 2) We have a vision and mission that is hard for 99% of other companies to even come close to 3) We have super smart people, that are a bunch of space geeks, are super passionate that we get to work with and learn from 4) There are nice and comfortable office spaces 5) We have the best tools and equipment in the world 6) We are building the New Glenn rocket. If you don't know what that is, go look it up 7) We are building Blue Moon and going to the moon, which is a necessary step to begin building more space infrastructure. Again insanely cool. 8) We are working rapidly toward flying humans on New Shepard. Freakin awesome. 9) We are developing the most amazing propulsion variants and liquid engines 10) We finally have engineering AND business leaders in place in our senior ranks. We have a CEO that gets engineering and can make quick and high quality business decisions. Sweet! 11) We have some of the most clean and well organized manufacturing facilities I've ever seen in my 30 years working in the industry. I could go on. Ok, so maybe I will, did I mention we have a state of the art engine manufacturing plant being built in Alabama? Oh yeah and a killer space ship looking/hanger looking new HQ building in Kent that's almost complete. Oh and that all most everyone at Blue wears Blue Origin branded t-shirts, sweat shirts, hats to work everyday because they are PROUD to be part of something so special? Oh yeah, and Blue provides free snacks, fruit, and beverages, dogs are allowed in some of buildings, and we have workout facilities.

Cons

I don't think these are cons really, but they are real things that may lead people to conclude Blue is not the place for them. Change - Blue is right in the middle of transforming from a science experiment mentality and heavy R&D company where we prototyped many things for years, to an actual business. Blue's kept its stellar engineering talent and technical ambition, but it also now has customers (thank goodness) and needs to become quickly highly capable of running launch operations, and higher rate production. I've always experienced that if a company is not always changing, its certainly not growing and in fact is failing or dying a slow death. I do know some of my friends are struggling with all the change. It is a little crazy - I guess I expect that a company trying to get millions of people to live and work in space will be some kind of crazy but that's just me. With growth and change comes more work than we can get done and that's not a bad problem to have. It does mean that there is more stress than if you want to go work at Costco, Starbucks, Boeing, etc. Growing pains - Desks have recently been reduced from six feet long to a still lengthy five feet to make space for more people. I will share that the five footer standing desk still fits my four monitors. Parking in Kent continues to be a challenge, but should be fine in a few months when our new building is done. More policies are being implemented (but with many buildings and sites now, it's probably a good thing to bring some consistency, repeatability, and predictability to our work).

2.0
Mar 6, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Exciting opportunities to work on cutting edge rocket technology. Fast paced environment and incredibly smart people abound. You'll learn a lot, but will work extremely hard. But, it is one of the most exciting opportunities you can get in aerospace today.

Cons

There's little opportunity for advancement, so be sure to negotiate up front. There are significant politics at the company and this stymies progress and diminishes morale of most staff. And, the vacation policy was horrible.

Viewing 19 - 21 of 1,199 Reviews

Glassdoor has 1,373 Blue Origin reviews submitted anonymously by Blue Origin employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Blue Origin is right for you.